Moving House

 

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I was playing Black Desert Online. Enjoying it, too. 

As with most things, I hadn't planned it. I just happened to hear that publishing rights were passing from Kakao to Pearl Abyss and I'd have to do something about it sooner or later if I didn't want to lose my characters. 

Even though I hadn't played in quite a while, once my memory had been jogged it occured to me I quite liked my BDO characters, at least the couple I could remember, so I probably ought to make the effort.

I went through the account transfer process. It was relatively painless as these things go. I even got a post out of it. And then, naturally, I had to patch up, log in and take one of my characters out for a spin.

I chose the Shai, since she was the one I'd been playing last. Everything was amazingly confusing, as you'd imagine with a game as peculiar and idiosyncratic as Black Desert, except for the combat. That came back to me in no time. 

Hardly surprising. At low levels there's not a huge amount more to combat than pressing a couple of buttons. Gets a bit more subtle later but no need to worry about that now. 

What was a little more unexpected was how quickly I got back into the routine of logging in every day. The daily log-in rewards had something to do with that, which I'm sure would please whoever designed them, but mostly it was that BDO is just fun to play. 

It's a deep and complex game in many ways but also a very simple one if you want it to be. I just ran around semi-randomly clicking on quests, autopathing to the location, killing whatever needed to be killed then autopathing back. On the way I enjoyed the gorgeous scenery and frequently veered off the pre-set path to go exploring. 

It was all going swimmingly until out of nowhere Valheim appeared and knocked me off the BDO horse. Donkey, to be strictly accurate. No shame on Black Desert. I fell off all the other mmorpg horses too.

Nothing much would have changed only this morning I saw that the transfer had taken place. Kakao are out of the picture, Pearl Abyss are in the driving seat and there are a ton of rewards for logging in under the new regime because of course there are.

I salivate on queue when the correct stimulus is presented and free stuff is about as correct as it gets. Also I was curious to see if the whole operation was going to continue as smoothly as it had so far.

There'd been some overnight issues but those were said to have been resolved so I thought I'd give it a try. I clicked on the icon on my desktop just to see if there'd be some clever handover between the outgoing and incoming owners but all I got was a "thank you for playing, now bugger off" notice from Kakao. 

Something along those lines. I forget the exact wording. I realize belatedly I should have taken a screenshot for illustration purposes but I didn't and it's too late now. I've deleted all the old files.

I did that after I started the up the new patcher. And I did that after I'd googled my way to the Pearl Abyss website and fiddled around until I found the download for their launcher. Maybe if I actually used the email address I'd signed up with I'd have received something telling me where to go for that. I hope so. I'm not logging in to find out now. Due diligence be damned.

In the usual way of these things, even though I directed it to the exact same place I already had the game files installed, the patcher decided it wanted to download all thirty-six gigabytes yet again. I realized before it had got through much more than a couple, so while it chunked away I copied all the files into the new Black Desert folder it had created inside the old one.

I thought that might give it indigestion but it seemed not to notice. Indeed, it was so oblivious it kept on downloading the files and installing them over the top of the ones that were already there. I stopped it and restarted it and then it got the idea.

If I'd done the transfer first the whole thing would probably have taken about ten minutes. As it was it took about twice that. Then I logged in. Or tried to. There was some error or other but I figured maybe it was because I'd been messing about so much I'd confused the thing. I stopped and started over.

Worked fine that time. My new login details were fine. My characters were all fine. When I got into the
game everyone was speaking Korean (the NPCs that is) but someone in chat said all you needed to do was reset the language in options so I did that and then that was fine too.

I thought I'd better pick up my freebies so I started on that but there are so many! It didn't help that I haven't cleared my mailbox in four years. It also didn't help that my inventory was full. And it certainly didn't help that as I took things out or sold them the inventory spaces healed over! I had less space after the clearout than I'd had before I started.

At first I thought that might be some transfer-related bug but then I realized it was much more likely a temporary upgrade had expired. Black Desert is really big on time-limited upgrades and they often feature in the free handouts. Well, sometimes. I don't know about "often".

To cut a long and really not that interesting story a little short, I ended up running all the way to Trent, a town out in the boonies I'd forgotten even existed. First I went to Carpheon to try and unload some stuff to the bank there but I had almost no space left.  

Black Desert's banks are all separate but these days you can at least see what you have where from any of them. And it seemed I had an almost-empty vault in Trent so that's where I went. It was a long run but I tabbed out for most of it and wrote some of this. 

Once I'd cleared some room I started claiming and opening boxes and packs until that started to get out of hand. I'd need about ten bank vaults to store everything if I claimed it all. Those four years of mostly untouched freebies in my mailbox are just the tip of the iceberg.

Once I'd upgraded half my armor and all my jewellery and grabbed a couple of nice titles I felt I'd done about as much as I could stand for one day. There was just one last thing.

According to Massively:OP there's also a coupon you can claim. Why there needs to be one of those on top of everything else I have no idea. I also had no idea how to claim a coupon so I had to google that. 

Seems you can't do it from the game. It involves logging in to your account on the Pearl Abyss website. Maybe that's the point, to make sure you know how that works.

Once you're there you'll find the code doesn't obviously fit into the four boxes. Nothing's ever straightforward, is it?

The code in question, according to M:OP, is 0225 WE ARE THE ONE but what you need to enter on the website is 0225-WEAR-ETHE-ONE! . Reddit told me that and Reddit was right. And don't forget the exclamation point or it won't work.

I've done all of that and now I feel I need a lie down. Nah, who am I trying to fool? I want to go chop trees in Valheim. Black Desert can go back on the bench for a while now I know my characters are safe and have all their stuff.

I will be back, though. Just can't say when.